Goodbye to all that
This article was first published in the Minden Times in January 2025.
One of the pleasures of tidying up, getting organized – as is recommended to begin a new year – is finding the treasures that were stored for exploration in that never-never land of time permitting. On the shelf, books bought and moved from bedside to bookshelf without their spines being cracked. In the computer, saved articles that (repeatedly, it seems) boggle the mind with thorough research and titillate the brain with love of language.
One such find in my recent spate of exemplary new year tidying was a 2022 New Yorker article by Parul Sehgal about the destruction of narrative culture by the current besottedness with trauma as a crucial component of any plot. No story is worth telling, he decries, without a back-story of trauma. No character is believable without visible tentacles to negative formative events. No behaviour is comprehensible without being connected to an historical injury.
Damn right, I thought! I am so tired of having to accommodate PTSD, complex PTSD, all the mini variations. Of feeling guilty for not having an appropriately traumatic creation story on which to hang my existence: how could I be human if I am not withered or misshapen by misfortune? Escaping trauma is the ultimate privilege to which is attached a high price of guilt.
But what if I hadn’t escaped trauma as much as absorbed it in a positive rather than negative way? What if I developed resilience by finding goodness in bad things? Developed strength through managing adversity? Celebrated surviving rather than suffering?
I recently watched Testament of Youth, a close-to-the-bone movie of Vera Britten’s book of that name, which I read and loved years ago and have on our shelves. It shows the heart-wrenching reality of privileged boys signing up for the Great War that was supposed to be over by Christmas but buried the world in evilness and inhumanity for four years. Vera’s brother, her fiancé, their/her friend were killed. She experienced war directly: she nursed the wounded and dying from both sides in Britain and in the mud of France. In retrospect she would say war destroyed an entire generation of men, one way or another. She became a powerful advocate for peace – but not powerful enough to prevent the disastrously punitive Treaty of Versailles that laid the foundation for the next war.
Vera Britten was grievously injured in body, soul and spirit by her experience. She was traumatized. She did not, however, expect accommodation as she nursed her injuries. Rather she channeled her pain and anger into action. She did what she could. She did not achieve her goal but she made a difference.
Resilience used to be a goal of life, communicated through a thousand maxims: Make the best of a bad situation. What doesn’t kill you makes you strong. You learn more from failure than success. Life ain’t fair. There is no shame in losing but there is shame in not trying.
I think, as we head into what by all accounts will be difficult times, that we need to rethink our relationship with adversity and (re)learn to love resilience.
Historically we admire people of courage and ingenuity. Pioneers. Immigrants. The boot-strappers. The bloody but unbowed. The persevering. It didn’t mean that we were unfeeling or unempathetic to those who were sidelined or felled by life. But I think we expected even them to do their part to the utmost of their ability. We recognized that, short of death, incapacity is only a part of the whole. There are things each of us can do and things we can’t, and there is a personal and social necessity for each to do what we can. Because what is life worth if we can make no contribution? How is uselessness ever a happy companion?
Let me be clear that I think trauma is a real and harmful thing, and that I have empathy for those who experience it. But let me be equally clear that I have admiration and gratitude for those who seek to digest their experience into a valued part of who they are, something that adds salt to their soup, puts muscle on their bone, gives colour to their lives.
And, to return to a point Sehgal made in his article, let me encourage the art of not explaining everything. Writing, he says, that leaves gaps for the reader to ponder as they have inclination is respectful writing. It presumes readers have something to offer to round out the story and that they want the challenge and the freedom to do so.
So, I think, in life. If you need to explain why you are interesting, you’re probably not.
